For us growing up, the point of the sets was that you got a cool spaceship or whatever, which you would put your personal Lego guy into, park near your "base", and play with until some other project demanded the parts. Then it would be disassembled mercilessly and consigned to the bin as grist for the constantly evolving construction project laid out on our much-abused air hockey table.
If a set was a particularly cool build, we might disassemble it and then rebuild it - but most of the time, once something got taken apart, no one was ever going to bother trying to reconstruct it from the manual, since doing so would have involved finding all 500 necessary pieces in the mega-bin.
If a set was a particularly cool build, we might disassemble it and then rebuild it - but most of the time, once something got taken apart, no one was ever going to bother trying to reconstruct it from the manual, since doing so would have involved finding all 500 necessary pieces in the mega-bin.